Olympics PROFILE. OLYMPIC SNAPSHOT MARK HENRY.

Gentle Giant Has Big Plans

412-pound Lifter Hopes For Boost From Home Fans

People stare at Mark Henry, shielding their eyes incredulously, as they would look at a solar eclipse. He has a tendency to blot out everything around him.

His bulk is the first issue, sometimes the only issue, with everyone he encounters. The night he met his girlfriend's parents, they cracked the guest room door to peek at him while he slept. They wanted to see what 6 feet 3 inches and 412 pounds looked like when it was laid out horizontally.

Complete strangers feel free to quiz him about intimate things: his neck size (22 inches), his cholesterol level (in the 170s), his clothing ("I buy at the big and rotund store.") In response, The World's Largest Olympic Weightlifter has developed a patter that qualifies him as the World's Largest Standup Comic.

"I've always been a big guy," says the 25-year-old Henry, microphone in hand, addressing a crowd of Motorola employees on lunch break in Schaumburg who are watching demonstrations by him and other Olympic athletes. "I weighed 220 pounds in the 5th grade."

The man complies. Wouldn't any rational person? Henry slips the candy bar into his pocket and grins.

"I have to let people know me to like me," he says later. "They feel like they have a tie with me. I try to have fun, try to make it a cool environment. A lot of athletes are stuck on themselves and don't want to socialize and that kind of thing. When I see that, I hate it."

Henry's gregarious embrace takes in just about everyone except his top world-class weightlifting rivals, many of whom he suspects of using performance-enhancing drugs. He finished 10th in the super-heavyweight class at the Olympics in 1992, when he tipped the scales at a mere 366 pounds. He has higher hopes for Atlanta, where he thinks a home crowd will fuel his considerable emotion.

"If you go into the dog's backyard, you're liable to get bit, that's the way I look at it," Henry says, his native East Texas twang surfacing. "This is my back yard, the United States."

U.S. national team coach Dragomir Cioroslan says Henry is unusually sensitive, capable of all the fine kinesthetic perceptions that separate great weightlifters from raw brutes.

As for his people skills? "At one time in his life, he had a problem with his size," Cioroslan says. "He wants to be like everyone else. That's why he shares and is so open."

Henry's girlfriend Jana Perry, a kindergarten teacher in Cincinnati, reports that he is unable to walk through an airport without scooping up babies like King Kong palming Fay Wray.

"He's one of the nicest people I've ever met," Perry says. "And he writes poetry. He'd kill me if he knew I was telling you this."

Not likely. This dog only bites when he has to.

Henry grew up in Silsbee, Texas, a small logging town in the piney woods east of Houston. His father, a diabetic, died when Henry was 13. By that time, Henry's mother, Barbara Mass, had already bought weight sets to distract her two large, rowdy sons.

"He knew we were going to be good athletes," Henry says of his father, a steelworker who played blues guitar on the side. "He always used to say that. We'd go home saying, `Feel my muscle!' and he'd say, `You gettin' big, boy!' "

Henry's older brother Patrick grew up to be an outstanding defensive lineman at Texas A&M. Henry played football and basketball--he brags that he is still able to dunk--but reserved his greatest passion for the simple iron-gray weights.

He won the junior national title in 1991 as a strong but somewhat unrefined lifter and began working part time with Cioroslan less than a year before the Barcelona Olympics. Silsbee residents stuffed quarters and dollars into tin cans placed at grocery checkout registers, raising thousands of dollars to help finance his training.

"He was a beginner then, in my opinion," said Cioroslan, a three-time Olympian who won a bronze medal for Romania in 1984. "What he was able to do at the Olympics, starting almost from scratch, was sensational."

Progress comes more slowly at the top. Henry has since won three national championships and holds U.S. records in both Olympic events: 396.75 pounds in the snatch and 485 pounds in the clean-and-jerk. He placed 15th at the world championships last year. His lifts are still a few dozen pounds shy of world-record territory.

Henry says this will be his last Olympics unless the weightlifting world gets more serious about drug detection. "If you're ranked in the top 20 in the world, you should be tested 10 times a year," he says. "Automatic. Spread 'em out." He is convinced that some medal winners in Atlanta will come up dirty.